The FocusOn Learning Conference, formerly known as the Mobile Learning Conference, was held in Austin, TX last week. My team member, Candelario Lopez, a fellow Sr. Instructional Designer of Clinical & Product Education at Intuitive Surgical, attended and brought back some great insights for our organization. He’s happy to share his impressions and takeaways with us today:

What tech were you most excited about?

Augmented reality – bringing the user interface and display out of the monitor & into the real world. Keynote from Wired Magazine’s Editor in Chief, looking at companies’ roadmaps for future technologies – lots of investments in augmented reality, virtual reality & mixed reality. (Mixed reality is sort of like some combination of realities.)

Interactive video – branching and assessment/scenarios in video format, allowing the user to dictate their learning path & allowing assessment/evaluation at the time of consumption. Provides more user control and engagement. Study: interactive video provides engagement opportunities through a delivery method that is easier to access and consume (vs. e-learning) and the study saw positive results in terms of retention.

Performance support – access to the right content at the time of need. Make sure that you evaluate the end-users’ process to make sure the performance support content is delivered effectively & is the right amount for that task/need. Case study: threw stuff together to be performance support, but was wrong medium, so couldn’t access it when they needed it.

The Good, The Bad, the Ugly & Beyond

The Good:

Path-based conference organization strategy:

Video

Mobile

Performance support

This allowed you to attend sessions geared toward what you want to accomplish in your organization.

Quality of speakers & sessions was very good. The speakers had real-life experience, sharing case studies and real experience or research & planning for future implementations. This allowed you to take away lessons learned from their experience to implement in your own organization. Both keynote speakers were well-respected in their industry: Scott Dadich, Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine, and Big Data analyst Soraya Darabi. They provides insights into their respective fields & where the industry is going in the near & distant future, helping to future-proof your training strategy at your organization.

Case studies that directly applied to our organization. Specifically, the Nature Conservancy laid out their strategy for learning materials, talked about the strategy as a whole, as well as planning and implementation, the tools and training delivery methods they used. They were also able to share evaluation outcome data: higher use of performance support materials, users’ knowledge of topic increased, reduced troubleshooting calls from users, have been asked to use same structure for other applications & topics.

The Bad:

If you have experience with these topics, getting to the real meat of what you’re looking for – like more advanced topics – was more difficult, have to outline your own agenda using the session details.

The Ugly:

Couple of sessions that focused on the “clicky-clicky bling-bling” aspect of the technologies, but no meaningful applications.

Couple of sessions that were all theory & research with no real-world application discussions.

The Beyond:

The way we consume content is leaning more and more towards performance support, and just-in-time content. Augmented reality looks to be a leader in supporting this transformation.

Takeaways?

Performance support is the right way to go, assuming you evaluate the users’ job processes & support them effectively.

Did any of you attend the FocusOn Learning Conference? What would your answers to these questions be? Please share during #chat2lrn on Thursday, June 16 at 8am Pacific, 11am Eastern, 4pm BST. See you there!

If you’ve spent any time on Twitter in the past couple of months, or have attended any Learning and Development conferences, you’ll be aware that the industry is abuzz with the news that virtual reality (VR) is about to go mainstream.

Forget the crummy graphics of the 1990s. For the first time, VR seems like it’s about to live up to it’s name. Realistic visuals and surround-sound audio are creating an immersive experience that can finally trick your brain into believing you are somewhere else.

pMeanwhile, companies like Magic Leap are raising millions in investment as they develop sophisticated augmented reality (AR) devices that combine simulated graphics with the world around you. Think Minority Report, or this YouTube demo.

But what does this have to do with L&D?

To quote blogger, speaker and #Chat2Lrn friend Donald Clark:

“In my 30+ years in technology I have never experienced a heat so intense and shocking as that I got when I first tried the Oculus Rift.

“As a learning professional, lots of applications flooded my mind. But more importantly, and this IS important, I thought of learning theory.

“The big problems in learning are:

attention

emotion

doing

context

retention

transfer

“This technology tackles these head on. We may be on the threshold of delivering educational and training experiences that are compelling and super-efficient, in terms of these positive attributes in learning.

“There’s also a bonus – this is a cool, consumer device that young people love. 2016 is only the start. VR is not a gadget, it’s a medium and a great learning medium.”

U.S. Navy personnel using a VR parachute training simulator. Image from Wikipedia.

So what’s next?

VR is already used to train the army, pilots and surgeons, but what applications can you think of for VR and AR?

Is this going to be a technology that L&D grabs and exploits? Or will the cost and difficulty of implementation leave us lagging behind the entertainment industry?

Join in using the hashtag #chat2lrn and discuss these and other questions on 11 February, 2016, 08.00 PST/11.00 EST /16.00 GMT.